Along the Frontier:

a column of good news

Dirt into Soil

1/15/12 –What's in a word? A lot.

Take dirt, for instance. It's the ubiquitous brown stuff that gets under your fingernails, sticks to your boots, and caused whole civilizations to collapse when it blew or washed away. We dig in dirt, play in it, move it from place to place when we need to, or ignore it when we don't. It's the substance that makes us dirty, unclean, filthy, unwanted, or ugly. Dirt, in other words, is something we'd rather keep on the sidelines of our lives. Rarely is it the source of good news.

However, if you change the name of the exact same substance to soil, then the world brightens a lot. Soil produces food, captures water, and builds prairies. It's the good stuff in your garden, on the farm, and in the wild. It's literally full of life and possibilities, the substance you want to protect, build, and use profitably. It's alright if dirt washes away, but if we lose soil then we're in trouble. After all, they never call the material washing off farms in significant quantities into the Mississippi River and flowing into the Gulf of Mexico dirt; they call it soil.

Under our shoes, it's the same substance, of course. That's the power words have on our imaginations. One word elicits a shrug, another provokes action. A geologist I know who studies our attitudes toward this essential resource puts it this way: "The problem with soil," he said, "is that we treat it like dirt." He was referring to past civilizations. Those who treated soil like soil did well, the ones who treated it like dirt did not. Unfortunately, the vast majority of kingdoms, empires, and civilizations fall into the latter category, which might not be good news for us.

Fortunately, there is a lot of good news about soil these days. In fact, we know so much about soil now, thanks the hard work of a wide variety of researchers and practitioners, that we never have to call soil dirt again. In theory, this should make a huge difference.

Color makes a difference too. We think of dirt as 'brown' and soil as 'black' – no? It's ok to let one wash away, but the other we want to keep and cultivate. But what's the difference between brown and black? Life. Carbon. Organic matter. Biology. Another name for black is humus, organic matter composed of large, complex molecules made up of carbon, nitrogen, minerals, and soil particles. When we talk of the rich, black soil of prairies or wetlands, we're talking about humus. In contrast, brown usually implies a lack of organic matter. This doesn't necessarily make brown worse than black – in some places brown is perfectly natural – but in many cases our management turned black into brown, which is exactly the geologist's point. Don't treat brown or black like dirt.

Instead, let's treat it all like soil. And this is where the good news comes in: we know how to grow soil. We know how to increase its organic content, facilitate the carbon cycle, expand its biological life, and enrich the nutrient density of the plants and animals that depend on the soil's fertility. We know, in other words, how to turn dirt into soil.

I won't go into the details here – that's the objective of another project. What I want to convey is how significant this news is. We know that soil is the foundation of all life on the planet, but until recently we didn't know much about soil's parts – why it made life possible – or how to manage it for improvement, rather than continue to deplete it. We know, for example, that a healthy population of fungi is essential to soil and plant health. Fungi are the 'good guys' in the soil, facilitating the transport of nutrients back and forth between soil particles and plant roots. A robust population of these 'good guys' is the key to creating humus – keeping the black in fertile soil.

However, we also know now that tilling – plowing – kills fungi. It literally rips them apart and exposes them to the killing effect of sunlight, heat, and erosion. We also know that tilling releases the carbon stored in soils back into the atmosphere as CO2 by exposing it to air. Tilling is an example of treating soil like dirt.

We know better now and this is great news. Building humus is nothing but good news, from its ability to increase food quality and quantity, its capacity to store more water, its ability to sequester CO2, and its resistance to erosion. It's a complex business and I'm not going to suggest that it is easy to do, or that it solves all our problems. But it's certainly a place to begin.

Starting with a word.

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Along the Frontier:

a column of good news

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